Beyond the Edge of Things
by Castile181
Summary: She had never expected a silver-haired Sinda to be her first. She wasn't sure why she had done it. She had never thought about what would come after. Kind of dark.


**Author's note:** This is an experiment with the weird style, grammar, and formatting that Salman Rushdie uses in his short stories. It's weird. I'm warning you. The line that inspired this work is from Oshun's Silmarillion Ten-word fics, which you should read.

* * *

She had never expected a silver-haired Sinda to be her first. She wasn't sure why she had done it. She had never thought about what would come after. Chastity was something she had been taught to hold in reserve, to retain. The princes of Aman had fought for the privilege – like dogs over meat. Vanya, Noldo, Teler, they would have killed for the chance. They nearly had. She had lain with none of them.

 _\- She wasn't sure why she had done it._  
She would have been derided for it in Aman. She would be derided for it here too if her brothers ever found out. She didn't even know if she liked him. She had never thought about it. It didn't matter. She could hardly speak Sindarin. He spoke not a word of Quenya. They had passed barely a minute in each other's company before this night. They had never spoken.

 _= She had given to him what all others had been denied._  
He did not know it. He knew nothing of the significance of what she had done. She preferred it that way. She had not wanted it to be significant. It hadn't been. She hadn't been his first. It had been easy to tell. He was stunningly beautiful. He had had others. She wondered if he knew that he had been hers.

She sat there watching him, as he lay there watching her. Her eyes flickered over his frame, unafraid, over the hard lines of his body, thick with muscle and scars, over the wealth of silver hair, bright as the stars, that was spread across the pillow. She watched his eyes. They were green as a pine, distant, remote, like a gorge in winter. He was a plain of frosted grass beneath a cold sun stretching out across an endless horizon.

 _\- She knew why she'd done it._  
The obvious answer first. Yes: it was the same reason she had stood in that square at Tirion. It was the same reason she had crossed the Helcaraxe. He had been the unexplored, the frontier. He was the unknown and the unknowable world beyond the edge of things.

 _\- She had been curious._ _  
_ _= She had wanted to conquer._

 _= Had he done it for the same reason?_  
They could hardly speak to each other but she knew it. The darkness in his eyes rhymed with the darkness in her soul. And: as he moved above her she had wondered if she was the one conquering after all. Or: Perhaps she was being conquered.

 _\- His eyes were intense, unflinching, barbaric, frightening._ _  
_ _= Artanis liked to be frightened; it reminded her that she was alive._

 _\- Alive_  
After the bitter cold of the Helcaraxë that lay dormant in the marrow of her bones. After the blood-thick incarnadine sea. She climbed back atop him. They came from opposite sides of the world. Yet their hips moved in unison. _Again._

 _\- She lived in Menegroth for a while._  
He was Thingol's chief counselor. He was the most powerful prince in Middle Earth. She was the granddaughter of Finwe. She was a high princess of Valinor. She went to live in Nargothrond for a while. She returned. She knocked on his door. _Again._ He had been waiting = waiting for her.

 _\- She had never touched another._ _  
_ _= She had never wanted to._

 _\- She had bound him to no vows._ _  
_ _= He had made her swear no oaths._

 _\- He had not lain with anyone else in her absence._ _  
_ _= She was sure of it._

She did not know when he started kissing her. When she started kissing him. He tasted like snow, and darkness, and redemption. She wanted to drown in him. She did not know when he began to speak to her. When she began to speak to him. She bore him a son. She supposed that meant they were married. Was that when she started loving him? She did not know. It felt older than that. Was that when he first loved her? She had never asked. He had never said. She bore him a daughter. Doriath was dead and asleep in the ocean. But the prince of Doriath had fathered children upon her body.

 _\- The children were as Doriath_ _  
_ _= They did not endure = they died_

– one in spirit.  
– one in body.

They tried to bring them back to life. In sleepless-nights-passionless full of grief they strove to create another. _Again._ Reincarnation was true. The Valar said so. They had been young once in Doriath. But they were old now.

 _\- Their immortal souls had overpowered their bodies._ _  
_ _= They had not the strength anymore to create life._

 _\- The ring had sapped her of her energy._ _  
_ _= She was a husk of what she used to be._

 _\- The world was a hollow shell of what it once was._ _  
_ _= He was the only thing that kept her alive._

But she was dying.

She left.

 _\- He hadn't come to the docks._ _  
_ _= He hadn't been able._

He had endured 12,000 years of this world. But he hadn't the strength to watch her leave. She turned back one last time. He wasn't there. The edge of the world slipped away.

She had never expected a silver-haired Sinda to be her first. She wasn't sure why she had done it. She had never thought about what would come after.


End file.
